Healing herbs

Echinacea and Calendula

Sunday, 28 May 2017

Lawns are a Soul-Crushing Timesuck and Most of Us Would Be Better Off Without Them

A recent essay by an Ohio woman who refuses to mow her lawn
has struck a nerve. Thirteen hundred people have weighed in with a
comment on Sarah Baker's tale of flouting a neighborhood
mowing ordinance in the face of a $1,000 fine.

As Baker notes in
her essay, lawns are a big part of contemporary American life. There are
somewhere around 40 million acres of lawn in the lower 48, according to
a 2005 NASA estimatederived from satellite imaging.
"Turf grasses, occupying 1.9% of the surface of the continental United
States, would be the single largest irrigated crop in the country," that
study concludes. Conservatively, American lawns take up three times as
much space as irrigated corn. The authors mapped the entirety of the
nation's turf grass, below. You'll notice that it's basically a
population density map of the U.S. — where there are people, there are
lawns.

You'll notice, if you look closely, that the colors start at light
green in the urban cores and get darker as you move outward — lawn
density increases in the suburbs.

In some states, a significant
chunk of the landscape is covered in turf grass — meaning residential
lawns, commercial lawns, golf courses, and the like. Delaware is 10
percent lawn. Connecticut and Rhode Island are 20 percent. And over 20
percent of the total land area of Massachusetts and New Jersey is
covered in grass, according to that 2005 NASA study.